Context: Industry adoption of development, life-cycle and architectural styles such as SOA tend to be imported into organizations and then move from an evangelist, grass roots kind of effort into a next phase of organizational maturity which tends to impose rigid constraints on the life-cycle, standards, governance and development of the architectural style. SOA is an example.

Problem(s): High level , holistic design and architectural work is needed to provide contractual visibility to clients. Architectural styles (OO, CBD, SOA etc) are co-mingled with the rigor of the top-down governance that is seen to be required, or they are sacrificed for rapid, quick and dirty, "let's not look around the bend until we get to it" approach.

Forces: The developers tend to push back to the imposition of increasing accountability and governance in general, including standardized development practices. The organization , in an effort to be accountable to the business, requires increased tracking, metrics and accountability. Developers will continue to resist increased accountability due to the perceived imposition on their time that is deemed less valuable than the actual development of the product. Against this, accountability and project visibility, allowing projections in order to fulfill "promises" (e.g., contracts, SLAs, etc) with clients (whether internal i.em business as a client, or external, as in other organizations that services/products are provided to).

(Re)solution: Combine a light top down governance and standardized software development process/method that looks holistically but does not require detail to the n-th degree prior to engaging in a project or program, coupled with agile iterative sprints.

Consequences: High level visibility and accountability are attained with some compromise with the "let's just do it" approach. Development is not impeded with heavyweight constraints. Promises to the business or external clients have a reduced risk of non-completion associated with them.